The Girl Who Played Go

72

The day after the storm, a beautiful sky.

At this time of year jasmine sellers badger everyone in the streets. I cannot resist their pleading and, thinking about the Chinese girl’s tanned wrists, I buy a bracelet of the flowers.

When I see her on the Square of a Thousand Winds, I remember the strange figure she cut the day before as she stood by the river in the rain. What was she doing there? What was she thinking? Yesterday she wandered through the town like a madwoman with slippers on her feet, but today her hair is swept off her forehead and smoothed into a heavy plait, and she is playing coldly and shrewdly again.

Something about her has changed in the last twenty-four hours. Or am I no longer looking at her in the same way? Beneath a drab dress her breasts have swollen, her body has shaken off its childish stiffness and is now vigorous and supple. Despite her frown and the hard look in her eye, her gentle pink mouth cannot help but be attractive. Still, there is a gloominess about her and she toys nervously with the end of her plait; as though it pains her somehow that she is blossoming with new life.

She moves a piece.

“Well played!” cries a man moving over towards our table.

On the Square of a Thousand Winds there are always passersby, stopping to look and occasionally taking the liberty of giving advice. This man is barely twenty years old, with oiled hair and wearing far too much perfume-he annoys me.

I make my move.

“What a mistake! You should have put it there!” cries the young know-all, pointing to the board with his fine, pink hand sporting a white jade ring. Then he turns to the Chinese girl and says, “I am a friend of Lu’s. I’m from the New Capital.”

She looks up and, after a brief, polite exchange, she leads him away from the go table.

The wind carries their voices over to me: an easy familiarity has been established between them and they are already using the familiar form of address with each other. The Chinese language has five different tonalities; it is like music, and this conversation is an opera I find unbearable. In my pique, I shove my hand into my pocket and crush the jasmine flowers.

Since I have been coming to the Square of a Thousand Winds the game of go has made me forget that I am Japanese. I thought I was one of them, but now I have been forced to remember that the Chinese are another race, from another world. We are separated by a thousand years of history.

In 1880 my grandfather took part in Emperor Meiji’s reforms while their ancestors were serving Ci Xi, the Dowager Empress. In 1600 mine had lost in battle and were slashing their own bellies open, while theirs took power in Peking. In the Middle Ages, when the women in my family wore kimonos with long trains, shaved their eyebrows and dyed their teeth black, their mothers and sisters were piling their hair into buns atop their heads. They were already binding their feet. A Chinese man and a Chinese girl understand each other before they even open their mouths. They are bearers of the same culture, which exerts a magnetism between them. How could a Japanese man and a Chinese girl ever love each other, having nothing in common?

The girl stays away a long time. As it mingles and disappears among the trees, her green dress-which just moments ago seemed to express her desolation-suddenly seems to exude her freshness. Is that the image of China, the object of my passion and my hatred? When I am close to her, I am disappointed by her misery, but when she is farther away I am obsessed by her charms.

She does not once look in my direction. I get up and leave.